A discombobulating mix of the familiar and the odd … a book fair in Beijing. Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters

As the minibus takes our party from Shanghai airport to the first of our hotels, it passes across a sizeable stretch of more or less dead earth. We coast along a three-lane highway, scanning a distant mix of farms and low-rise offices. Suddenly breaking out of the vast horizontal is a huge advertising hoarding oriented towards the international traffic streaming past. Its high-resolution image shows a bare landscape that rhymes with its real setting, save the rugged mountains in its background. Thundering into the picture, bearing down on the viewer at many times life size, is a woman on horseback. She is naked except for a pair of expensive-looking handbags slung over her shoulder.

It's the first of many experiences over the coming days, that seem reminiscent of Star Trek, as UK journalists are introduced to Chinese writers, publishers and academics ahead of the London book fair, of which China is the focus. Because while much of the Chinese city and literary life I see is a part of the globalised 21st-century world, too familiar to fully notice, there is also an unmistakable sense that I have landed on another planet. I'm not exactly going where no reader has gone before, but as a relative newcomer to Chinese writing, I am indeed about to discover a strange new world.

As China busies itself buying up Africa, cornering world markets in consumer products and vital mineral resources, and propping up the US dollar, it strikes an odd note when senior government minister Wu Shulin tells our party repeatedly that we must make allowances for China being "a developing country". And it's true of course that in China's interior there remains a peasant class barely scraping a subsistence. But down the road in Shanghai there is a four-storey Comme des Garçons superstore, and I see one woman struggling so hard to spend all her money that she is walking a brace of poodles in matching red jumpers and Burberry miniskirts.

The books world, too, is a discombobulating mix of the familiar and the odd. The internet is a common spectre at all our meetings – it has meant the closure, as in the west, of independent bookshops, and has eaten into profits from sales and copyright, but also provides a fillip to the trade, and an initial platform for new writers. The web was little monitored until the mid-noughties, and writers could express themselves without the bowdlerisation that would likely have killed their chance of being conventionally published. Even now, it offers a way to publish opinions that can reach millions before the authorities have a chance to silence them. And while print runs for many books are suffering the kind of decline that western writers lament – a literary success might sell 40,000 copies, not great for a market comprising 20% of humanity – some of the internet's writers have secured enormous audiences on paper. They include Han Han, whose first novel, Triple Door, first published in 2000, is an impassioned satire on education, and has sold 2m copies, helped by his early embrace of blogging as a forum for unbuttoned criticism of political corruption, labour exploitation and other such "sensitive" areas.

These days, the party is paying close attention to what gets written on the internet. Consider the obvious case of Liu Xiaobo, the poet and essayist awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2010, and currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for "subverting state power" while his wife remains under house arrest. The government now has software apparatus that will zap any mention of him anywhere in Chinese cyberspace, emails included. However, this did not stop Han Han adding a piece of theatrically blank irony to his blog in response to the Nobel award – a pair of opening and closing quotation marks. (If Xiaobo is an important dissident, Han Han's caustic commentaries – which are read by a giddying third of all Chinese web users – leave him free to pursue parallel careers as a racing driver and singer without undue interruption from the authorities.)

Having been warned that to address the Liu Xiaobo question with a writer would be tantamount to shutting down the interview, I decide to raise it at a meeting with Wu Shulin, who is eager to emphasise books as "a bridge" for the kind of "foreign exchange" that China seeks. When I suggest that this will carry less credibility with western readers while Liu Xiaobo remains behind bars, the minister becomes audibly fiercer, though the words have a studied moderation: "I told the Norwegian culture minister that in China we have a lot of good writers who have produced a lot of excellent works, and if you award [the Nobel] to Liu Xiaobo you are sending a strong signal that this is a political award and the Chinese people will not recognise it … China will follow our own path."

He adds: "On the one hand we should protect the people's rights to express their views; on the other, we have to ensure social stability in our laws."

Yet if anyone from the west is inclined to doubt China's new commitment to literary culture, the figures for its Rural Reading Room programme give one serious pause: China has 630,000 villages, and this 18.5bn yuan (£1.84bn) programme aims to provide every one of them with a Reading Room. The smaller ones, says Wu Shulin, have only 1,500 books and 100 periodicals; larger, more prosperous places have 50,000 books. In the past 10 years, 500,000 of these small public libraries have been completed, "to ensure", the minister says, "the citizens' rights to know and to read".

What's most startling when I talk to writers on my trip is how familiar our conversations seem, at least at first: I hear a lot about the importance of following one's imagination, the usefulness of grants and creative writing tuition, the prominence of Ian McEwan and Paulo Coelho, sequels to classic Chinese novels and the artistic cheapness of popular "office" and "grave raider" novels.

My initial expectation was that Chinese writers would either look hunted, or they would be transparent government stooges: the situation is naturally more complicated. What's more, it becomes all too clear that there are, not surprisingly, an awful lot of very good Chinese writers that are so far known only to the vanishingly small English-language readership here.

A Yi, for instance, is barely known even in China, but his quality as a morally unsparing writer – a kind of Chinese cousin to Camus, unafraid to depict corruption and toxic working lives – has interested the best translators of Chinese fiction such as Julia Lovell, who translated his stark fable of farming villagers dwarfed by huge forces of globalisation, The Curse.

Many of A Yi's novels are modelled on his experiences as a younger man, when he was a policeman, and share some of the concern with precision and impersonality of a judicious crime report. Cat and Mouse, for example, is based on a true story about a young man who committed a murder with the intention of attracting the glamorising attention of the media. A Yi says he was unhappy that the confused reasoning behind the crime was too clearly expressed in the book; he plans to revise it, long after its publication and reviews, and make it truer.

Bi Feiyu, who cuts a much smoother profile than A Yi's introspective hunch, is one of the few Chinese writers adventurous English readers may already know. His novel Three Sisters, an epic portrayal of one family's journey through the flattened public life of the Cultural Revolution, won the 2010 Man Asian literary prize.

He talks wearily of being described as a great writer about women: "I hate it, but I have to pretend to like it," he says, partly because – something most Booker authors don't need to worry about – his stories are popular with women's magazines. "I'm not the best Chinese writer about women. Actually, the gender balance in my stories is about 50/50 … I hate the label, but I've been wearing this hat for 10 years now.

"Portraying characters," he says, "is the most fundamental task of the writer." And the careful, nuanced realism of his storytelling does not seem at all alien to an English reader, though he stresses that this kind of realism is not mainstream in China. Both A Yi and Bi Feiyu talk about how their earlier work included more modernist formal experiments, though, as A Yi explains it, they eventually decided that "the water was more important than the cup".

Han Dong, a noteworthy poet, is also a sly and beguiling novelist who tells somewhat fabulist, Murakami-esque tales of life under the Cultural Revolution. The events of the 1960s and 1970s are something he says the government is happy to see criticised by writers these days, partly to avoid making such writers martyrs, and partly because the marginal status of most serious novelists means the authorities don't need to worry too much about what they say. Han Dong's work draws on his own – unusually happy – experience of being banished with his family to the countryside during a period when any schooling was an empty formality and he could concentrate on having fun. It is in stark contrast to the earlier generation of "invisible writers", whose work had to remain secret during the Cultural Revolution but is now being published, often posthumously.

His novel Screwed! looks at the ramifications of a joke between two teenage boys also assigned to the farming interior. When they say they'll take out their sexual frustrations on an ox, it is taken seriously by local police. The cow's supposedly violated rights become a focus of outrage, while the boys are tethered in a cowshed.

Sheng Keyi, meanwhile, turns a mercilessly ironic eye on modern Chinese life, particularly the difficulties faced by women in a hypersexualised culture and the insecure economic life of migrant workers. She seems a poised, self-contained individual, but tells us that while she is writing she frightens her friends by becoming a raging monster. Her 2004 novel Northern Girls, whose central character, Qian Xiao Hong, finds her tough destiny driven by the accident of having unusually large breasts, is set to be published by Penguin Australia in May.

There are numberless more, equally impressive writers at work in China today; I trust publishers at the London book fair will boldly go and discover, as enthusiastically as I did, this complex and rich new literary world.

• Many of the authors will be appearing at the London book fair's Market Focus Cultural Programme, partnered by the British Council, 16-18 April.